


Don't Think

by JohnlockAndATardis



Category: The Black Tapes Podcast
Genre: Angst, What Did You Expect, im not even sorry, no roses and white knights here no sir, not the tiniest bit
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-14
Updated: 2016-04-14
Packaged: 2018-06-02 04:51:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,470
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6551779
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/JohnlockAndATardis/pseuds/JohnlockAndATardis
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Following the reveal that a countdown timer has been discovered, Alex takes some time to do what she thinks best. Tragedy ensues.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Don't Think

     The fear has been there all along, she thinks. It is like a shadow in the corner of her mind, slowly creeping forward, day by day. At first she could laugh it off, make it a joke, a myth contrived by basement-dwellers with massive servers and gaping holes in their spare time. The Unsound. It seems fake, or, at least, it sounds like it should be. But the more she learns about Strand’s Black Tapes, the greater grows the cloud of doubt which hangs like a haze over the studio, over herself. And as that terrific, intrusive cloud swells, the shadow keeps creeping. Closer and closer, halting whenever she casts her gaze its way, taunting her and laughing when her back is turned. Alex is growing tired of shadows.

     When she first begins to see them, they are easily excusable. She hasn't been sleeping, she's barely been eating. Caffeine supplements both in the form of turbo shots and metallic-flavored ginseng gum which tastes like blood in her mouth and only enhances the jitters haunting her life. It becomes a cycle. The caffeine which keeps her awake during the day refuses to leach out at night. Restless sleep cries for a cure, for the coffee which makes her hands shake as she holds the recorder, like an alcoholic in need of a drink. The more she gives in, the worse it gets, and the more frequent these... distractions become. She knows she is slipping, losing touch. Everyone sees it, from Nic to Paul and Terry, even the intern who chews sour apple bubblegum and smiles at her behind red-rimmed glasses with such an air of youth Alex almost tells her to run, to go as far from here as she can. Almost.

     When Nic drops the bombshell that scatters everything in her brain and sends it scrambling back together all wrong, she feels a sick sense of... well, it's not satisfaction. If she had to describe it, she would say that it is the emotional equivalent to learning a cancerous tumor in her brain is causing the headaches and fatigue that plague her, but that there's no cure and no certainty if it will or will not kill her. Disturbing is the only word which she can think of the remotely describe this onslaught of emotions so vastly different and interconnected that she is left piecing them together like broken glass. The person she sees reflected back in these shattered mirrors is no longer herself, but somebody else, a face upon a screen that proves unfamiliar to her eye. Alex is spiraling, falling, and she's afraid. She tries to hide it, but there's a truth to those words that gnaw their way like rats into her consciousness, scratching away at the defenses she puts up.

     When they announce she's to be put on temporary leave, she doesn't know what to feel. And the rats just grow louder. They begin to consume her, buzzing and buzzing and buzzing ceaselessly, flies caught in a web. There are so many questions left unanswered. What was that knocking in her sleep recording, and where did it come from? Was it really her voice, whispering in the night the name of a demon humans have long forgotten to fear? Is there something somehow even more sinister at play here, and, if so, how does Coralee Strand fit into all of this? She cuts her hands on the shards of her life she tries to piece back into place, and as blood stains everything she does she begins to understand. None of this would have happened if it were not for her. Strand, the Unsound, Sebastian Torres. She needs to go before the trail she is leaving becomes crimson with blood not her own.

    So she flees. No. She does not flee. To flee implies that she goes forth only with fear, with no other cause, no reason outside of her own self and the string of emotions suffocating her day by day. And while it would make her a fool and a liar to claim that she is not afraid, she cannot truthfully confess either that it is self-preservation guiding her hand. Indeed, the worry for the continuation of her own existence does not bite nearly so deeply as the concern for her friends and colleagues, for those whom she has woven this story around. It is a calculated decision to leave, to go somewhere far from those she has put at risk. From anyone who might be targeted because of her. She has a friend with a cabin, small but well built, with running water and electricity. There's no cell service so far into the woods, so she knows that no one will suspect when she doesn't get in touch for a few days. With any luck, a storm will roll in as she goes out, and whatever danger which had been attached to the life of Alex Reagan will pass.

-

     The day comes, and Alex has to admit to herself that she is scared. Beyond that. The terror which meets her in the morning is all consuming, a figure just behind her shoulder breathing with an inhuman humidity along the arch and curve of her neck. There's something about knowing that this is it, that this may be her last day. It doesn't just set her on edge, it pushes her closer and closer to the point of falling off. She spends too long thinking about death, and the end. What will happen if this really is it? Will Strand go on believing in his skeptic's way, or will her passing alert him to the possibility that he was wrong, that there's something more after all? It's silly, but it makes her feel like a character within some form of the horror genre, like the would-be heroine tragically killed off for the matter of furthering the protagonist's plot. Overhead, a scampering that has proceeded to grow louder alerts her that she isn't truly alone, and she jumps, not for the first time since she began her stay. Certainly not for the last.

     Dinner that night she takes an unprecedented care in creating. While she's certainly not an artisan chef, there's something about the morbid possibility of her own impending doom that is... serendipitous? No, she wouldn't use such a cheerful word. But it is something. Freeing, almost. Like how terminal patients suddenly feel the urge to live out fantasies that have always been gone from their reach. And while preparing a three course meal isn't exactly extravagance, the price tag associated with her night's cuisine certainly pushes the envelope towards luxury. She takes her time, lets herself enjoy the process in the same way that she does her journalism. By the time she's done, the aromas have worked their way through every inch of the small cabin, therapeutic in their sheer decadence. Her mother would be proud. She, is proud. As she sits to the lonely table with a tall bottle of wine she would have never before considered opening -a gift, from an old college friend- she considers how this acceptance of what is likely to come has given her a freedom she's never known before. There has always been this concept in life of waiting for a special moment, as though joy is an item not to be too often indulged in. The beauties of life, she now realizes, have often gone to waste simply by holding out for a time that may never come. She is glad, on some level, that she's gotten this moment in time, this chance to live freely despite the necessary constraints she has applied. Alex drinks the whole bottle to herself without a worry of gluttony or sin, muting the noises of the world beyond herself until they grow too loud to be ignored. And when that time comes, though she trembles with each step, she throws the windows wide and casts open the doors.

     A hundred eyes stare at her. She is the proverbial abyss, at the edge of that place where hope comes to die. Alex stares back. She does not stop staring as they stalk forward with their shadowed forms, does not turn as the scratching like rats upon the roof grows louder yet. It crawls closer, scritching in the manner of nails on chalkboards. She is tall despite her stature, brave because of her fear. When the darkness comes she is strong as it engulfs her with its wet, burning heat, and consumes her whole.

     It strikes her as almost funny how some people can feel most alive as they lay dying. When Doctor Strand finds her body just three hours too late, after a plane ride and a frantic drive, he thinks that nothing will ever strike him as funny again. 


End file.
